There are strange regions where the monotony of ignoble streets is
broken only by an occasional church, a Board School, or a public-house.
From the city's cathedral to every point of the compass, except the
west, they stretch almost without limit till they reach the bedraggled
fields maturing for development. They form by far the larger part of an
Empire's capital. Each of them is, in fact, a vast town, great enough,
as far as numbers go, to make the Metropolis of a powerful State. Out of
half a dozen of them, such as Islington, Bethnal Green, or Bermondsey,
the County Council could build half a score of Italian republics like
the Florence or Pisa of old days, if only it had the mind. Each
possesses a character, a peculiar flavour, or, at the worst, a separate
smell. Many of them are traversed every day by thousands of rich and
well-educated people, passing underground or overhead. Yet to nearly all
of us they remain strange and almost untrodden. We do not think of them
when we think of London. Them no pleasure-seeker counts among his
opportunities, no foreigner visits as essential for his study of the
English soul. Not even our literary men and Civil Servants, who talk so
much about architecture, discuss their architecture in the clubs. Not
one in a thousand of us has ever known a human soul among their
inhabitants. To the comfortable classes the Libyan desert is more
familiar.
At elections, even politicians remember their existence. From time to
time a philanthropist goes down there to share God's good gifts with his
poorer brethren, or to elevate the masses with tinkling sounds or
painted boards. From time to time an adventurous novelist is led round
the opium-shops, dancing-saloons, and docks, returning with copy for
tales of lust and murder that might just as well be laid in Siberia or
Timbuctoo. When we scent an East End story on its way, do we not
patiently await the battered head, the floating corpse, the dynamiter's
den, or a woman crying over her ill-begotten babe? Do we not always get
one or other of the lot? To read our story-tellers from Mr. Kipling
downward, one might suppose the East End to be inhabited by bastards
engaged in mutual murder, and the marvel is that anyone is left alive to
be the subject of a tale. You may not bring an indictment against a
whole nation, but no sensational writer hesitates to libel three million
of our fellow-citizens. Put it in Whitechapel, and you may tell what
filthy lie you please.
About once in a generation some "Bitter Cry" pierces through custom, and
the lives of "the poor" become a subject for polite conversation and
amateur solicitude. For three months, or even for six, that subject
appears as the intellectual "_rôti_" at dinner-tables; then it is found
a little heavy, and cultured interest returns to its natural courses of
plays, pictures, politics, a dancing woman, and the memorials of Kings.
It is almost time now that the poor came up again, for a quarter of a
century has gone since they were last in fashion, and men's collars and
women's skirts have run their full orbit since. Excellent books have
appeared, written with intimate knowledge of working life--books such as
Charles Booth's _London_ or Mr. Richard Free's _Seven Years Hard_, to
mention only two; but either the public mind was preoccupied with other
amusements, or it had not recovered from the lassitude of the last
philanthropic debauch. Nothing has roused that fury of charitable
curiosity which accompanies a true social revival, and leaves its
victims gasping for the next excitement. The time was, perhaps, ripe,
but no startling success awaited Mr. Alexander Paterson's book, _Across
the Bridges_. Excellent though it was, its excellence excluded it from
fashion. For it was written with the restraint of knowledge, and
contained no touch of melodrama from beginning to end. Not by knowledge
or restraint are the insensate sensations of fashion reached.
Mr. Paterson's experience lay on the south side of the river, and the
district possesses peculiarities of its own. On the whole, I think, the
riverside streets there are rather more unhealthy than those in the East
End. Many houses stand below water-level, and in digging foundations I
have sometimes seen the black sludge of old marshes squirting up through
the holes, and even bringing with it embedded reeds that perhaps were
growing when Shakespeare acted there. The population is more distinctly
English than on the north side. Where the poverty is extreme it is more
helpless. Work as a whole is rather steadier, but not so good. The smell
is different and very characteristic, partly owing to the hop-markets.
Life seems to me rather sadder and more depressing there, with less of
gaiety and independence; but that may be because I am more intimate with
the East End, and intimacy with working people nearly always improves
their aspect. It is, indeed, fortunate for our sensational novelists
that they remain so ignorant of their theme, for otherwise murders,
monsters, and mysteries would disappear from their pages, and goodness
knows how they would make a living then!
It is not crime and savagery that characterise the unknown lands where
the working classes of London chiefly live. Matthew Arnold said our
lower classes were brutalised, and he was right, but not if by brutality
he meant cruelty, violence, or active sin. What characterises them and
their streets is poverty. Poverty and her twins, unhappiness and waste.
Under unhappiness, we may include the outward conditions of
discomfort--the crowded rooms, the foul air, the pervading dirt, the
perpetual stench of the poor. In winter the five or six children in a
bed grow practised in turning over all at the same time while still
asleep, so as not to disturb each other. In a hot summer the bugs drive
the families out of the rooms to sleep on the doorstep. Cleanliness is
an expensive luxury almost as far beyond poverty's reach as diamonds.
The foul skin, the unwashed clothes, the layer of greasy smuts, the
boots that once fitted someone, and are now held on by string, the
scraps of food bought by the pennyworth, the tea, condensed milk, fried
fish, bread and "strawberry flavour," the coal bought by the
"half-hundred," the unceasing noise, the absence of peace or rest, the
misery of sickness in a crowd--all such things may be counted among the
outward conditions of unhappiness, and only people who have never known
them would call them trivial. But by the unhappiness that springs from
poverty I mean far worse than these.
The definition of happiness as "an energy of the soul along the lines
of excellence, in a fully developed life" is ancient now, but I have
never found a better. From happiness so defined, poverty excludes our
working-classes in the lump, almost without exception. For them an
energy of the soul along the lines of excellence is almost unknown, and
a fully developed life impossible. In both these respects their
condition has probably become worse within the last century. If there is
a word of truth in what historians tell us, a working-man must certainly
have had a better chance of exercising an energy of his soul before the
development of factories and machinery. What energy of the personal soul
is exercised in a mill-hand, a tea-packer, a slop-tailor, or the watcher
of a thread in a machine? How can a man or woman engaged in such labour
for ten hours a day at subsistence wage enjoy a fully developed life? It
seems likely that the old-fashioned workman who made things chiefly with
his own hands and had some opportunity of personal interest in the work,
stood a better chance of the happiness arising from an energy of the
soul. His life was also more fully developed by the variety and interest
of his working material and surroundings. This is the point to which our
prophets who pour their lamentations over advancing civilisation should
direct their main attack, as, indeed, the best of them have done. For
certainly it is an unendurable result if the enormous majority of
civilised mankind are for ever to be debarred from the highest possible
happiness.
The second offspring of poverty in these working regions of our city is
waste. And I have called waste the twin brother of unhappiness because
the two are very much alike. By waste I do not here mean the death-rate
of infants, though that stands at one in four. No one, except an
exploiter of labour, would desire a mere increase in the workpeople's
number without considering the quality of the increase. But by waste I
mean the multitudes of boys and girls who never get a chance of
fulfilling their inborn capacities. The country's greatest shame and
disaster arise from the custom which makes the line between the educated
and the uneducated follow the line between the rich and the poor, almost
without deviation. That a nature capable of high development should be
precluded by poverty from all development is the deepest of personal and
national disasters, though it happen, as it does happen, several
thousand times a year. Physical waste is bad enough--the waste of
strength and health that could easily be retained by fresh air, open
spaces, and decent food, and is so retained among well-to-do children.
This physical waste has already created such a broad distinction that
foreigners coming among us detect two species of the English people. But
the mental waste is worse. It is a subject that Mr. Paterson dwells
upon, and he speaks with authority, as one who has taught in the Board
Schools and knows the life of the people across the bridges from the
banana-box to the grave.
"Boys who might become classical scholars," he writes,
"stick labels on to parcels for ten years, others who have
literary gifts clear out a brewer's vat. Real thinkers work as
porters in metal warehouses, and after shouldering iron fittings
for eleven hours a day, find it difficult to set their minds in
order.... With even the average boy there is a marked waste
of mental capital between the ages of ten and thirty, and the
aggregate loss to the country is heavy indeed."
At fourteen, just when the "education" of well-to-do boys is beginning,
the working boy's education stops. For ten or eleven years he has been
happy at school. He has looked upon school as a place of enjoyment--of
interest, kindliness, warmth, cleanliness, and even quiet of a kind. The
school methods of education may not be the best. Mr. Paterson points out
all that is implied in the distinction between the "teachers" of the
Board Schools and the "masters" of the public schools. Too much is put
in, not enough drawn out from the child's own mind. The teacher cannot
think much of individual natures, when faced with a class of sixty. Yet
it would be difficult to overrate the service of the Board Schools as
training grounds for manners, and anyone who has known the change in our
army within twenty-five years will understand what I mean. At fourteen
the boy has often reached his highest mental and spiritual development.
When he leaves school, shades of the prison-house begin to close upon
him. He jumps at any odd job that will bring in a few shillings to the
family fund. He becomes beer-boy, barber's boy, van-boy, paper-boy, and
in a year or two he is cut out by the younger generation knocking at the
door. He has learnt nothing; he falls out of work; he wanders from place
to place. By the time he is twenty-two, just when the well-to-do are
"finishing their education," his mind is dulled, his hope and interest
gone, his only ambition is to get a bit of work and keep it. At the best
he develops into the average working-man of the regions I have called
unknown. Mr. Paterson thus describes the class:
"These are the steady bulk of the community, insuring the
peace of the district by their habits and opinions far more
effectively than any vigilance of police or government. Yet,
if they are indeed satisfactory, how low are the civic standards
of England, how fallen the ideals and beauties of Christianity!
No man that has dreams can rest content because the English
worker has reached his high level of regular work and rare
intoxication."
One does not rest content; far from it. But the perpetual wonder is, not
that "the lower classes are brutalised," but that this brutality is so
tempered with generosity and sweetness. It is not their crime that
surprises, but their virtue; not their turbulence or discontent, but
their inexplicable acquiescence. And yet there are still people who
sneer at "the mob," "the vulgar herd," "the great unwashed," as though
principles, gentility, and soap were privileges in reward of merit, and
not the accidental luck of money's chaotic distribution.